Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  A short silence fell, and the deadlock persisted. Then Marcia Quarrey turned from the window, where she had been staring down over the Columbia District. “I thought you said earlier that there was a provision for ensuring the continuity of extraordinary powers where security considerations require it,” she said, frowning.

  “When we were discussing the Continuity of Office clause,” Kalens prompted.

  Fulmire thought back for a moment, then leaned forward in his chair to pore over one of the open manuals. “That was under ‘Emergency Situations,’ not ‘Security,’” he said after a few moments, without looking up. “Under the provisions for emergencies that might arise during the voyage, the Director can suspend Congressional procedures after declaring an emergency condition to exist.”

  “Yes, we know that,” Quarrey agreed. “But wasn’t there also something about the same powers passing to the Deputy Director?”

  Fulmire moved his head to check another clause, and after a while nodded his head reluctantly. “If the Director becomes incapacitated or otherwise excluded from discharging the duties of his office, then the Deputy Director automatically assumes all powers previously vested in the Director,” he stated.

  Kalens raised his head sharply. “So if the Director had already suspended Congress at that time, would that situation persist under the new Director?” He thought for a moment, then added, “I would assume it must, surely. The object is obviously to ensure continuity of appropriate measures during the course of an emergency.”

  Fulmire looked uneasy but in the end was forced to nod his agreement. “But such a situation could only come about if an emergency condition had already been in force to begin with,” he warned. “It could not be applied in any way to the present circumstances.”

  “You don’t think that a ship full of Asiatics coming at us armed to the teeth qualifies as an emergency?” Borftein asked sarcastically.

  “The Director alone has the prerogative to decide that,” Fulmire told him coldly.

  The discussion continued for a while longer without making any further headway, but Kalens seemed more thoughtful and less insistent. Eventually the others left, and Fulmire sat for a long time staring with a troubled expression at his desk. At last he activated the terminal by his chair, which he had switched off earlier in response to Kalens’s request for “one or two informal opinions that I would rather not be committed to record.”

  “Which service?” the terminal inquired.

  “Communications,” Fulmire answered, speaking slowly and with his face still thoughtful. “Find Paul Lechat for me and put him through if he’s free, would you. And route this via a secured channel.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “The thing I still can’t understand is what motivates these people,” Colman remarked to Hanlon as they walked with Jay to Adam’s house. “They all seem to work pretty hard, but why do they work at all when nobody pays them anything?”

  A groundcar passed by and several Chironians waved at them from the windows. “It can’t be quite like that,” Jay said. “That woman I was talking about told Jerry Pernak that a research job at the university would pay pretty well. That must have meant something.”

  “Well, it sure doesn’t pay any money.” Colman turned his head toward Hanlon. “What do you say, Bret?”

  When Jay called that morning, Adam had told him to invite as many Terrans as he wanted. Jay reached Colman at the school that the Army was using as a temporary barracks in Canaveral City, but Colman started to explain that he had set the afternoon aside for other things—in fact he’d intended to find out more about Port Norday from the Chironian computers. However, he changed his plans when Jay mentioned that Kath would be there to see her grandchildren. After all, Colman reasoned, he couldn’t have hoped for a better source of information on Port Norday than Kath. As Hanlon was off duty, Colman had invited him along too.

  “I hope you’re not expecting an answer,” Hanlon said. “It makes about as much sense to me as Greek. . . .” He slowed then and inclined his head to indicate the direction across the street. “Now, there’s the fella you should be asking,” he suggested.

  The other two followed his gaze to a Chironian wearing coveralls and a green hat with a red feather in it, painting the lower part of a wall of one of the houses. Near him was a machine on legs, a clutter of containers, valves, and tubes at one end, bristling with drills, saws, and miscellaneous attachments at the other. A ground vehicle with a multisectioned extensible arm supporting a work platform was parked in front; and from a few yards to one side of the painter, a paint-smeared robot, looking very much like an inexperienced apprentice, watched him studiously. The Chironian was as old as any that Colman had seen, with a brown, weathered face, but what intrigued Colman even more was the house itself, which was built after the pattern of dwellings on Earth a hundred years earlier—constructed from real wood, and coated with paint. It was not the first such anachronism that he had seen in Franklin, where designs three centuries old coexisted quite happily alongside maglev cars and genetically modified plants, but he hadn’t had an opportunity to stop and study one before.

  The painter glanced across and noticed them watching. “Nice day,” he commented and continued with his work. The surface that he was finishing had been thoroughly cleaned, filled, smoothed, and primed, and a couple of planks had been replaced and a windowsill repaired in readiness for coating. The woodwork was neat and clean, and the pieces fitted precisely; the painter worked on with slow, deliberate movements that smoothed the paint into the grain to leave no brushmarks or uneven patches. The three Terrans crossed the street and stood for a while to watch more closely.

  “Nice job you’re doing,” Hanlon remarked at last.

  “Glad you think so.” The painter carried on.

  “It’s a pretty house,” Hanlon said after another short silence.

  “Yep.”

  “Yours?”

  “Nope.”

  “Someone you know?” Colman asked.

  “Kind of.” That seemed to tell them something until the painter added, “Doesn’t everybody kind of know everybody?”

  Colman and Hanlon frowned at each other. Obviously they weren’t going to get anywhere without being more direct. Hanlon wiped his palms on his hips. “We, ah . . . we don’t mean to be nosy or anything, but out of curiosity, why are you painting it?” he asked.

  “Because it needs painting.”

  “So why bother?” Jay asked. “What’s it to you if somebody else’s house needs painting or not?”

  “I’m a painter,” the painter said over his shoulder. “I like to see a paint job properly done. Why else would anyone do it?” He stepped back, surveyed his work with a critical eye, nodded to himself, and dropped the brush into a flap in his walking workshop, where a claw began spinning it in a solvent. “Anyhow, the people who live here fix plumbing, manage a bar in town, and one of them teaches the tuba, My plumbing sometimes needs fixing, I like a drink in town once in a while, and one day one of my kids might want to play the tuba. They fix faucets, I paint houses. What’s so strange?”

  Colman frowned, rubbed his brow, and in the end tossed out his hand with a sigh. “No . . . we’re not making the right point somehow. Let’s put it this way—how can you measure who owes who what?” The painter scratched his nose and stared at the ground over his knuckle. Clearly the notion was new to him.

  “How do you know when you’ve done enough work?” Jay asked him, trying to make it simpler.

  The painter shrugged. “You just know. How do you know when you’ve had enough to eat?”

  “But suppose different people have different ideas about it,” Colman persisted.

  The painter shrugged again. “That’s okay. Different people value things differently. You can’t tell somebody else when they’ve had enough to eat.”

  Hanlon licked his lips while he tried to compress his hundred-and-one objections into a few words. “Ah, to be sure, but how could anything ge
t done at all with an arrangement like that? Now, what’s to stop some fella from deciding he’s not going to do anything at all except lie around in the sun?”

  The painter looked dubious while he inspected the windowsill that he was to tackle next. “That doesn’t make much sense,” he murmured after a while. “Why would somebody stay poor if he didn’t have to? That’d be a strange kind of way to carry on.”

  “He wouldn’t get away with it, surely,” Jay said incredulously. “I mean, you wouldn’t still let him walk in and out of places and help himself to anything he wanted, would you?”

  “Why not?” the painter asked. “You’d have to feel kinda sorry for someone like that. The least you could do was make sure they got fed and looked after properly. We do get a few like that, and that’s what happens to them. It’s a shame, but what can anybody do?”

  “You don’t understand,” Jay said. “On Earth, a lot of people would see that as their big ambition in life.”

  The painter eyed him for a moment and nodded his head slowly. “Mmm . . . I kinda figured it had to be something like that,” he told them.

  Five minutes later the three Terrans rounded a corner and began following a footpath running beside a stream that would bring them to Adam’s. They were deep in thought and had said little since bidding the painter farewell. After a short distance Jay slowed his pace and came to a halt, staring up at a group of tall Chironian trees standing on the far side of the stream alongside a number of familiar elms and maples that were evidently imported—genetically modified by the Kuan-yin’s robots to grow in alien soil. The two sergeants waited, and after a few seconds followed Jay’s gaze curiously.

  The trunks of the Chironian trees were covered by rough overlapping plates that resembled reptilian scales more than bark, and the branches, clustered together high near the tops in a way reminiscent of Californian sequoias, curved outward and upward to support domed canopies of foliage like the caps of gigantic mushrooms. The foliage was green at the bottoms of the domes but became progressively more yellow toward the tops, around which several furry, cat-sized, flying creatures were wheeling in slow, lazy circles and keeping up a constant chattering among themselves. “You wouldn’t think so, but that yellow stuff up there isn’t part of those trees at all,” Jay said, gesturing. “Jeeves told me about it. It’s a completely different species—a kind of fern. Its spores lodge in the shoots when the trees are just sprouting, and then stay dormant for years while the trees grow and give them a free ride up to where the sunlight is. It invades the leaf-buds and feeds through the tree’s vascular system.”

  “Mmm . . .” Colman murmured. Botany wasn’t his line.

  Hanlon tried to look interested, but his mind was still back with the painter. After a few seconds he looked at Colman. “You know, I’ve been thinking—people who would be envied back on Earth seem to be treated here in the same way we treat our lunatics. Do you think we’re all crazy to the Chironians?”

  “It’s a thought,” Colman replied vaguely. The same idea had crossed his mind while the painter was talking. It was a sobering one.

  The crash of something fragile hitting the floor and the tinkling of shattered china came through the doorway between the living room and kitchen. Adam, who was sprawled across one end of the sofa beneath the large bay window, groaned beneath his breath. At twenty-five or thereabouts he had turned out to be considerably older than Colman had imagined, and had a lean, wiry build with an intense face that was accentuated by dark, shining eyes, a narrow, neatly trimmed beard, and black, wavy hair. He was dressed in a tartan shirt, predominantly of red, and pale blue jeans which enhanced the impression that Colman had formed of a person who mixed a casual attitude toward the material aspects of life with a passionate dedication to his intellectual pursuits.

  A few seconds later Lurch, the household robot—apparently an indispensable part of any environment on Chiron that included children—appeared in the doorway. “It slipped,” it announced. “Sorry about that, boss. I’ve wired off an order for a replacement.”

  Adam waved an arm resignedly. “Okay, okay. Never mind the sackcloth-and-ashes act. How about cleaning it up?”

  “Oh, yes. I should have thought of that.” Lurch about-faced and lurched back to the kitchen. The sound of a door opening and the brief clatter of something being fumbled from a closet floated back into the room.

  “Does it do that a lot?” Colman asked from his chair, which had been cleared of a pile of books and some stuffed birds to make room for him when they had arrived an hour or so earlier.

  “It’s a klutz,” Adam said wearily. “It’s got a glitch in its visual circuits somewhere . . . something like that. I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you get it fixed?” Colman asked.

  Adam threw up his hands again. “The kids won’t let me! They say it wouldn’t be the same any other way. What can you do?”

  “We couldn’t let him do that, could we?” Kath said to Bobby, age ten, and Susie, age eight, who were sitting with her across the room, where they had been struggling to master the intricacies of chess, “Lurch is half the fun of coming here.”

  “You don’t have to live with it, Mother,” Adam told her.

  Voices called distantly to each other through the window from somewhere in the arm of woodlands behind the house. Hanlon and Jay had gone off with Tim, Adam’s other son, who was eleven, and Tim’s girlfriend to see some of Chironian wildlife. Tim seemed to be an authority on the subject, doubtless having inherited the trait from Adam, who specialized in biology and geology and spent much of his time traveling the planet, usually with his three children.

  Or, at least, the three that lived with him. Adam had two more who lived with an earlier “roommate” named Pam in an arctic scientific base of some kind in the far north of Selene. Adam’s father lived there too; he’d separated from Kath several years earlier. Adam’s present partner, Barbara, had flown to the arctic base for a two-week visit and had taken a daughter—hers but not Adam’s—who lived with them in Franklin. Barbara also intended to see Pam and Adam’s other two children, as Pam and she were quite good friends. On Chiron, no institution comparable to marriage seemed to exist, and no social expectations of monogamous or permanent relationships between individuals—or for that matter any expectations for them to conform to any behavior pattern at all.

  Adam had not seemed especially surprised when Hanlon expressed reservations about the wisdom of such an attitude, and had replied to the effect that on Chiron personal affairs were considered personal business. Some couples might choose to remain exclusively committed to each other and their family, others might not, and it wasn’t a matter for society or anybody else to comment on. As far as he was concerned, Adam had said, the notion of anybody’s presuming to decree moral standards for others and endeavoring to impose them by legislation was “obscene.”

  Adam also had an older sister—to the surprise of the Terrans—who designed navigation equipment for spacecraft at an establishment located inland from the Peninsula, a twin brother who was an architect and rumored to be getting friendly with a lively redhead from the Mayflower II whom Colman couldn’t place, a younger sister who lived with two other teenagers somewhere in Franklin, and a still younger half-brother, not a son of Kath’s, who was with their father in Selene. It was all very confusing.

  “But doesn’t this kind of thing upset the kids when it happens?” Hanlon had asked uneasily.

  “Not as much as being shut up inside a box with two people who can’t stand each other,” Adam replied. “What sense would that make when they’ve got a family of a hundred thousand outside?”

  “We’re dying to meet your sister, Jay,” Tim’s girlfriend had said, an arm slipped through Tim’s on one side and Adam’s on the other.

  “Her mother’s dying too,” Jay had replied dryly.

  Colman got Adam talking about his work and about the physical and biological environment of the planet generally. Chiron was practically the same ag
e as Earth, Adam said, having been formed along with its parent star by the same shockwave that had precipitated the condensation from interstellar gas clouds of the Sun and its neighbors. It was an intriguing thought, Adam suggested, that the bodies of the people being born now on Chiron and on Earth all included heavy elements that had been formed in the same first-generation star—the one that had triggered the shock wave when it exploded as a supernova. “We might have been born light-years apart,” he told Colman. “But the stuff we’re made of came from the same place.”

  Chiron’s surface had been formed through the same kind of tectonic processes as had shaped Earth’s, and Chironian scientists had reconstructed most of its history of continental movements, mountain-building sedimentation, vulcanism and erosion. Like Earth, it possessed a magnetic field which reversed itself periodically and which had written a coherent story onto the moving seafloors as they spread outward and cooled from uplifts along oceanic ridges; the complicated tidal cycle induced by Chiron’s twin satellites had been unraveled to yield the story of previous epochs of periodic inundation by the oceans; and analysis of the planet’s seismic patterns had mapped its network of active transform faults and subduction zones, along which most of its volcanoes and earthquake belts were locked.

  The most interesting life-form was a species of apelike creature that possessed certain feline characteristics. They inhabited a region in the north of Occidena and were known as “monkeats,” a name that the infant Founders had coined when they saw the first views sent back by the Kuan-yin reconnaissance probes many years ago. They were omnivores that had evolved from pure carnivores, possessed a highly developed social order, and were beginning to experiment with the manufacture of simple hand tools. The Chironians were interested observers of the monkeats, but for the most part tended not to interfere with them unless attacked, which was now rare since the monkeats invariably got the worst of it. Other notable dangerous life forms include the daskrends, which Jay had already told Colman about, various poisonous reptiles and large insects that were concentrated mainly around southern Selene and the isthmus connecting it to Terranova, though some kinds did spread as far as the Medichironian, a flying mammal found in Artemia which possessed deadly talons and a fanged beak and would swoop down upon anything in sight, and a variety of catlike, doglike, and bearlike predators that roamed across parts of all four continents to a greater or lesser degree.